All of the four studies reviewed on medicine usage awareness have high or excellent methodological quality. The main reason for the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) ban on the use of certain medicines is because of an actual or potential health risk to the athlete [ 81]. Many elite athletes take non-doping-classified medicines for enhancing athletic performance or treating injuries. From an OSH perspective, a control measure can increase the occupational risk if it is not appropriately managed. In this case, there will be a potential source of harm or adverse health effect on elite athletes if the medicine is taken improperly. Injured athletes who fail to report an injury may take medicine to mask pain so they can continue training and competing [ 82]. By examining urine sample of athletes in the Olympic Games in Sydney 2000, a study pointed to a dangerous overuse of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory agents [ 83]. Blood sample measurements from athletes ( n = 330) in the 2004 New Zealand Ironman triathlon identified the prevalence of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAID) was 30% [ 84]. Another study [ 85] has identified a high rate of non-prescribed use of NSAID consumption among triathletes from 23 different countries, but it was not specified how the questionnaires were distributed and collected. Among younger athletes, a study [ 86] reported nearly one of seven high school football players used NSAIDs daily, according to data from self-administered questionnaires. However, the incidence might be under-reported considering coaches distributed the questionnaires which may lead to bias. These studies indicate elite athletes frequently take incorrect doses for extended periods and are not aware of the potentially deleterious adverse effects. Elite athletes have also been shown to use NSAIDs the day before competing for pain prevention [ 85, 86], such as for delayed-onset muscle soreness [ 87] as a “prophylactic pain treatment” [ 88]. Medicine usage for pain prevention can be found in various sports such as American football [ 86], soccer [ 88], marathon running [ 89] and triathlon [ 84]. First, consider circumventing competition entirely. For example, noncompete clauses can help you avoid hyper-rivalry with firms eyeing your star employees.

Fedor A, Gunstad J. Limited knowledge of concussion symptoms in college athletes. Appl Neuropsychol Adult. 2015;22(2):108–13. Meyers MC, Higgs R, LeUnes AD, Bourgeois AE, Laurent CM. Pain-coping traits of nontraditional women athletes: relevance to optimal treatment and rehabilitation. J Athl Train. 2015;50(10):1034–41. Hachfeld L, MacWilliams B, Schmidt B. Physical awareness a key to improving adolescent male health: a grounded theory study of the perception of testicular self-examination in male student athletes. J Nurse Pract. 2016;12(4):243–9. Dehumanizing: Classifying others as inferior, dangerous or evil to justify oppressing or eliminating them.It also highlights why any sport on which a betting market exists needs to be able to provide its athletes with a reasonable wage. Yes, the refusal of Football Australia to pay the Matildas a fair wage is sexist and unkind, but it also makes Australian football vulnerable to corruption. If it’s possible to make as much money by giving away a penalty in “one stupid match” as you make in a year, it becomes much easier to say yes. In the case of Arizona, it took only a week for a federal district court to dismiss Hoffman and Bowyer’s suit, citing an absence of “relevant or reliable evidence.” The court admonished the plaintiffs that “gossip and innuendo” cannot “be the basis for upending Arizona’s 2020 General Election.” Hoffman and the other plaintiffs appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear the matter, but it waited to do so until March. In the meantime, election-fraud conspiracy theories in Arizona were growing out of control.

Through an examination of companies such as Boston Scientific and Paramount, and through research on auctions, the authors identified three principal drivers of competitive arousal: intense rivalry, especially in the form of one-on-one competitions; time pressure, found in auctions and other bidding situations, for example; and being in the spotlight—that is, working in the presence of an audience. Individually, these factors can seriously impair managerial decision making; together, their consequences can be dire, as evidenced by many high-profile business disasters. The communication between employer and employee is an important aspect of organisational safety management. Nevertheless, even if employers and management have adequate information, they cannot promote safety culture without effective communication. We have to finish this science project at all costs before the deadline, or we’ll flunk the class and have to do it again next year. To combat competitive arousal, Malhotra, Ku, and Murnighan recommend two steps. First, understand the affliction’s three drivers: 1) intense rivalry (especially in a small field), 2) time pressure, and 3) the presence of an audience (including media attention and colleagues’ scrutiny). Then take preventative action; for example, reduce time pressure during a high-stakes negotiation by insisting on a short time-out. The spark that ignited the Arizona audit was an amateur video, taken on Election Night, of an unidentified female voter outside a polling place in what Kristin Clark recognized as Hoffman’s district. The voter claimed that election workers had tried to sabotage her ballot by deliberately giving her a Sharpie that the electronic scanners couldn’t read. Her claim was false: the scanners could read Sharpie ink, and the ballots had been designed so that the flip side wouldn’t be affected if the ink bled through. Nevertheless, the video went viral. Among the first to spread the Sharpiegate conspiracy was another one of Charlie Kirk’s youth groups, Students for Trump. The next day, as Trump furiously insisted he had won an election that he ended up losing by roughly seven million votes, protesters staged angry rallies in Maricopa County, where ballots were still being counted. Adding an aura of legal credibility to the conspiracy theory, Adams, the Public Interest Legal Foundation president, immediately filed suit against Maricopa County, alleging that a Sharpie-using voter he represented had been disenfranchised. The case was soon dismissed, but not before Adams tweeted, “ just filed to have our client’s right to #vote upheld. Her #Sharpie ballot was cancelled without cure.” Arizona’s attorney general, Mark Brnovich, a Republican, investigated, and his office took only a day to conclude that the Sharpie story was nonsense. But, by then, many Trump supporters no longer trusted Arizona’s election results. Clark, the former Democratic challenger to Hoffman, told me that she watched in horror as “they took B.S. and made it real!”

Understand the Drivers of Competitive Arousal

Bloodgood B, Inokuchi D, Shawver W, Olson K, Hoffman R, Cohen E, et al. Exploration of awareness, knowledge, and perceptions of traumatic brain injury among American youth athletes and their parents. J Adolesc Health. 2013;53(1):34–9. Turning Point, which has received small grants from the Bradley Foundation, is headquartered in Arizona, and it has played a significant role in the radicalization of the state, in part by amplifying fear and anger about voter fraud. Turning Point’s chief operating officer, Tyler Bowyer, is a member of the Republican National Committee and a former chair of the Maricopa County Republican Party. Bowyer’s friend Jake Hoffman runs an Arizona-based digital-marketing company, Rally Forge, that has been Turning Point’s highest-compensated contractor. In the summer of 2020, Rally Forge helped Turning Point use social media to spread incendiary misinformation about the coming elections. In September, the Washington Post reported that Rally Forge, on behalf of Turning Point Action, had paid teen-agers to deceptively post thousands of copycat propaganda messages, much as Russia had done during the 2016 campaign. Adult leaders had instructed the teens to tweak the wording of their posts, to evade detection by technology companies. Some messages were posted under the teens’ accounts, but others were sent under assumed personae. Many posts claimed that mail-in ballots would “lead to fraud,” and that Democrats planned to steal the Presidency. Brown KN, Wengreen HJ, Beals KA. Knowledge of the female athlete triad, and prevalence of triad risk factors among female high school athletes and their coaches. J Pediatr Adolesc Gynecol. 2014;27(5):278–82. Notice anything? If you did, add your observations to the comment section below. Improvanism As A Solution False Compromise: Offering to meet half way on matters in which there is clearly a fair and unfair choice.

A representative for the national Republican Party tried to silence Gates when he spoke out to defend the integrity of Arizona’s election. He told me that Hoffman’s ally Tyler Bowyer, of the Republican National Committee, paid him a visit and warned, “You need to stop it.” According to Gates, Bowyer made it clear that “the Republican National Committee supports this audit.” Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for Bowyer, denied that the visit was an official attempt at intimidation, calling it instead a “personal courtesy.” Román, P. Á. L., Pinillos, F. G., & Robles, J. L. (2018). Early sport dropout: high performance in early years in young athletes is not related with later success. Retos: nuevas tendencias en educación física, deporte y recreación, (33), 210-212.Hawkins RD, Fuller CW. An examination of the frequency and severity of injuries and incidents at three levels of professional football. Br J Sports Med. 1998;32(4):326–31. Nilstad A, Andersen TE, Bahr R, Holme I, Steffen K. Risk factors for lower extremity injuries in elite female soccer players. Am J Sports Med. 2014;42(4):940–8. At Condor Performance, we encourage those we work with to push this obsession with winning towards their preparation and their processes. Why? On an individual level it highlights the practical danger in turning professional athletes into “winners”. Not only does a “win at all cost” mentality have on-field consequences – as the Essendon case reveals – but it undermines public trust in sport and athletes altogether.

Although the Arizona audit may appear to be the product of local extremists, it has been fed by sophisticated, well-funded national organizations whose boards of directors include some of the country’s wealthiest and highest-profile conservatives. Dark-money organizations, sustained by undisclosed donors, have relentlessly promoted the myth that American elections are rife with fraud, and, according to leaked records of their internal deliberations, they have drafted, supported, and in some cases taken credit for state laws that make it harder to vote. Why stop there? Any sports book worthy of a prize these days could probably explore a similar mentality around winning or indeed success, whether in professional football, rugby, cycling, boxing and so on, and in many cases probably justify it too. It’s easy to see without looking too far that not much is really sacred. Since the 2020 election, this movement has evolved into a broader and more aggressive assault on democracy. According to some surveys, a third of Americans now believe that Biden was illegitimately elected, and nearly half of Trump supporters agree that Republican legislators should overturn the results in some states that Biden won. Jonathan Rauch, of the Brookings Institution, recently told The Economist, “We need to regard what’s happening now as epistemic warfare by some Americans on other Americans.” Pillars of the conservative establishment, faced with a changing U.S. voter population that threatens their agenda, are exploiting Trump’s contempt for norms to devise ways to hold on to power. Senator Whitehouse said of the campaign, “It’s a massive covert operation run by a small group of billionaire élites. These are powerful interests with practically unlimited resources who have moved on to manipulating that most precious of American gifts—the vote.”Injured athletes can reduce rehabilitation time by using NSAIDs, but if they return to intensive training too soon they may be at risk of overuse injuries and inappropriate biomechanical stress [ 90, 91]. Some types of sports involving extensive and strenuous use of limbs and muscle groups may cause chronic tendinopathies and inflammation, in which conditions professional athletes may take NSAIDs with medical instruction [ 92]. Though permitted by WADA, elite athletes should not take non-doping classified medicines without medical supervision [ 93] because of the risk of the side effects [ 94, 95, 96]. Many athletes are still unaware that inappropriate medicine use can adversely affect their wellbeing in the long-term. Personal protective equipment (PPE) usage awareness Example: You always said people have to take responsibility for themselves so I didnt think you needed my help when you had to go to the ER. Strotmeyer S Jr, Lystad RP. Perception of injury risk among amateur Muay Thai fighters. Inj Epidemiol. 2017;4(1):2.